Dr. Mark, My Mom’s Ex-Husband

Sophia

I almost dropped the food when I heard her laugh.

I left work early for this. I had a bag of chicken piccata from Lucia's, still warm, and I already knew how tonight was going to go. Candles. The blue dress Jason always said he loved. Six years together. Four of them engaged. I just wanted one night that felt like the beginning again.

I should have called first. I never did. That was supposed to be the good part of us. No need to knock on my own door.

The apartment felt too quiet when I walked in. Not empty quiet. Wrong quiet.

Then I heard it. A laugh, low and unfamiliar, coming from our bedroom. My stomach dropped before my brain even caught up. I told myself it was nothing. Maybe the TV. Maybe I was just tired.

I opened the door anyway.

Jason was in our bed. On top of some woman I had never seen before in my life. Nobody moved for a second. Nobody said a word. I just stood there holding a bag of pasta like an idiot, staring at the man I was supposed to marry.

He didn't even look sorry. He looked annoyed, like I had walked into a meeting I wasn't invited to.

"Sophia." He said my name slow, like he needed the extra seconds to think. "This isn't what it looks like."

"It's exactly what it looks like."

My voice came out calmer than I felt. I put the food down on the dresser because my hands were shaking too hard to hold onto it. The woman grabbed the sheet, mumbled something, and slid off the bed to disappear into the bathroom. Smart girl.

"How long," I said.

"Soph, can we not do this right now."

"How long, Jason."

He rubbed the back of his neck, the way he always did right before he said something he knew would hurt me. "A year. Maybe a little more."

A year. I did the math without meaning to. That covered his sister's wedding. That covered Christmas. That covered my birthday, when he gave me the necklace I was still wearing, the one that felt like it was burning against my skin now, like it knew exactly what it had been part of.

"Why," I asked, because some stupid part of me still wanted a reason. Still wanted this to make sense somehow.

"You want to know why?" He said it like I was the one who should feel embarrassed. "You're never home. You're at the office till nine, then at the kitchen table sketching till midnight. I used to think that was ambition. Now I think you just didn't want to be here with me. So don't stand there like you're the only victim. You checked out of this a long time before I did."

I laughed. It came out sharp and ugly, and it surprised both of us.

"I worked that hard so we could afford the life you wanted. The house upstate. Your loans. You told me to keep going. You told me you were proud of me."

"I was proud of you. I was also lonely." He said it so simply, like loneliness was something I owed him for.

Something in me just shut off.

"Get out," I said. "Or I will."

"It's my name on the lease too."

"Then I'll go."

I didn't grab much. My laptop. My portfolio. The photo of my dad off the nightstand, because that one I couldn't leave behind no matter how badly I wanted to run. Jason stood in the doorway saying my name over and over, like repeating it enough times would fix something, and I didn't look at him again. I didn't look at her either when she came out of the bathroom, dressed now, hovering near the counter like she didn't know if she was allowed to be in the room.

I walked out. Down the stairs. Out the front door of the building I had called home for three years.

The second I hit the sidewalk, the sky opened up.

Not a drizzle. A full, angry downpour, the kind that soaks you in ten seconds flat. I stood there in it anyway, mascara running, my dress ruined, the necklace still burning against my collarbone. My hands were shaking again, and this time it wasn't from anger. It was just everything. All of it, at once.

I pulled out my phone and my thumb found her name before I even decided to call her.

Mia picked up on the second ring, laughing at something in the background, and the second she heard me try to talk she went quiet.

"Soph? What's wrong. Talk to me."

"Can you come get me." My voice cracked right down the middle. "I'm outside my building. I don't have anywhere else to go."

"I'm already grabbing my keys," she said. "Don't move. I'm ten minutes away."

I stood there in the rain and waited, and for the first time all night, I let myself cry.

Three days. That's how long I'd been living in Mia's spare room, and in three days I had done nothing but lie on her pull-out couch in one of her old college t-shirts, scrolling through my phone, refreshing nothing, waiting for nothing.

Mia finally had enough on day three.

"Okay." She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, looking at me like I was a problem she'd decided to solve by force. "Get up. Shower. We're going out."

"I don't want to go out."

"I didn't ask what you wanted." She threw a dress at me. It hit me in the face. "You've eaten cereal for every meal since Tuesday. You haven't opened your laptop once, and you love that stupid laptop more than most people. I'm not watching you turn into a ghost over a man who wasn't even worth the rent you two split."

She wasn't wrong. About any of it.

"One drink," I said.

"One drink. Sur